AMERICA is a nation of dark truths. Many of them are about hidden war crimes. One such — an airstrike on March 18, 2019, that killed dozens of civilians in Baghuz, Syria — was disclosed on Saturday by The New York Times after months of piecing together confidential documents, classified reports and interviews with personnel directly involved in the attack.
Truth, as they say, has a way of showing up. Now that truth has made its appearance, will accountability get to do its job? The short answer is "no". There are two reasons for saying this. One is the dark history of the Baghuz airstrike itself.
The other is the dark history of the United States. Start with the Baghuz airstrike as told by The Times. A US military drone circles high overhead, looking for military targets. The drone's high-definition field of vision picks up a large crowd of women and children huddled against a river bank.
There is no sign of any terrorist. Without warning, a US F-15E fighter jet streaks across the drone's vision and drops a 500-pound bomb on the crowd, swallowing it in a shuddering blast. As the smoke clears, a few people stumble away seeking cover. This time, a second jet drops a 2,000-pound bomb. Then a third jet drops another bomb, killing most of the survivors.
Back at the US military's command centre at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, uniformed personnel watching the live drone footage are stunned. The newspaper quotes one officer as saying "we just dropped on 50 women and children". The actual death toll turned out to be 80. A legal officer is said to have flagged the strike as a possible war crime that required an investigation. The Times puts it thus: "But at nearly every step, the military made moves that concealed the catastrophic strike.
Death toll was downplayed. Reports were delayed, sanitised and classified." The US-led coalition forces even bulldozed the blast site to bury evidence. The US military is on record as saying that every report of civilian casualties was investigated and the findings reported publicly. If so, why the silence for more than two years?
Now for the dark history of America. The US has never owned up to its war crimes, let alone taken accountability for any of them. What's worse, the US does everything within its means to stop the International Criminal Court from investigating any such allegations.
The most blatant example of this is the sanctioning of ICC officials by the then US president Donald Trump for wanting to investigate US war crimes in Afghanistan. As the Rome Statute that gave birth to the ICC makes clear, the US, like all countries, has two choices when it comes to investigating war crimes. It can either prosecute such war crimes through its municipal courts or it can allow the ICC to prosecute such crimes.
The US is doing neither. Consider just the war on terror. Close to one million people lost their lives in America's 20-year war on terror, many of whom were civilians. Some 35 million more were displaced. Iraq wasn't the only illegal war.
There were many more. The military must be made accountable. So must the US leaders who ordered the attacks. The US cannot call itself the leader of the free world while advancing such impunity.